This post starts, like many of my days do, with the Handsomest of Marketboys yakkin’ at me the other day on my morning walk through the market. I was, I believe, telling him about my forthcoming furlough, in which I shall be not only taking time off from work but also from the Internet–so it’ll be me, my writing, my , and my guitar. He told me by way of reply that if I ever wanted a thousand-dollar Stratocaster, I should let him know.
Now this gave me pause for a couple of reasons. One, I already kinda knew that the HofM seemed to have a bit of musical inclination; I’ve heard him sing a time or two off the top of his head. Two, Jesus Jumping Christ on a pogostick, if you’ve got a thousand-dollar Strat sitting around and you’re not playing it, you are doing it a sore injustice. (Said the owner of a near-thousand-dollar Taylor 210, who is very conscious of the General STERNLY awaiting her return to him.)
So I told him I had no need of another guitar, since I had two, and he should be playing his!
Which of course sent me down the path of remembering I haven’t been playing my guitar much lately–not out of lack of interest, but because of change in focus at session. In the back of my brain, though, I’ve been pondering that I’ve got all these other songbooks and things, and other instruments, and it’d be nice to bring at least one other instrument with me to session that I could pair up with the piccolo to trade off between. Maybe not the General since the General’s too much instrument when I’m really playing him and he’s really more of a I WANT TO COMMAND THE RHYTHM LINE instrument anyway, at least in my hands. Which is not what I want to use the General for when I’m in a session.
Bring in Le Monsieur Beaudry and his bouzouki. As I’m looking through Le Vent du Nord’s site gallery tonight, I’m thinking–y’know what, I’ve got a goddamn bouzouki myself. AND an octave mandolin, neither of which have been played much in the last few years. So I tuned up both Autumn and Spring tonight, and looked in my mandolin fakebook, and lo and behold, there is “Banish Misfortune” waiting for me to start playing with it. It’s a slightly different arrangement than what we’ve been doing in session, but that is entirely okay. This is where my fledgling “pay attention to what my fellow session players are doing” powers can start activating!
Tried playing both Autumn and Spring tonight and realized that right now, Autumn’s fret spacing feels more comfortable to me, possibly because I’ve been more used to the General lately so I’ve been used to a narrower neck. So when Dara and I have our off-weeks for session practice, I’m going to start spending time on Autumn as well as with Shine, who will remain my primary session instrument for the time being.
I feel very good about this plan. \0/
Great Big Sea at the Moore in Seattle, 3/12/2011 (Part 1 of 3)
This was, hands down, the biggest GBS fan outing I’d arranged in some time. I was juggling communication about it across four different channels–Facebook, Twitter, email, and the OKP–and five, really, if you count anything off-net. (This did, I am embarrassed to admit, make me a little crazy; apologies to those to whom I got more crazy than was warranted, and much gratitude to all as I kept a whole bunch of balls in the air to get the whole shebang going!) It wound up going in three, count ’em, three different waves all across Saturday afternoon and evening.
Continue reading “Great Big Sea at the Moore in Seattle, 3/12/2011 (Part 1 of 3)”
Raspberry Girl
As y’all know I’ve grown quite fond of daily stops to visit the nice boys who run the table for Frank’s at Pike Place. I know a few of them by name and a few more of them by face at this point, and several of them know me.
One of them, a young rather cute fellow of Asian extraction, told me he was learning how to take pictures and asked if I could be a guinea pig for him. I said sure, and he promised me prints when he got the picture developed, while I thought to myself OH RIGHT that actually has to happen for pictures on real film, doesn’t it?
When I stopped by tonight for my usual raspberries (and by ‘stopped by’ I mean ‘sneaky excuse to bid them all a pleasant holiday’, and by ‘all’ I really mean ‘the really cute one with the glasses and the ponytail, but I didn’t say that in my Outside Voice’), he gave me two copies of the pic! One was too dark but the other wasn’t half bad, so I snapped a pic of it with my iPhone to share here.
Even though it’s kind of meta to post a picture of a picture of yourself, no?
